Henry Rzepa and Peter Murray-Rust were awarded the Henry Skolnik Award from the Division of Chemical Information of the American Chemical Society at the 2012 fall national ACS meeting in Philadelphia. Henry and Peter have been the pioneers in creating a chemicaly-aware semantically-rich web presence and have been leaders in pushing for open data and open source. Both of them have been quite influential on my own ideas and projects, and I have worked with them both on a number of projects. I was honored to participate in the symposium surrounding this award.

2 Responses to “My talk on blogging at the Skolnik Award Session”

Wendy Warr has kindly agreed to produce a report on the entire symposium, and with most of the talks either being online or available as PPT, no doubt it will be out shortly (now here is an interesting question; I do not know at the moment whether it will be “open” or not!).

My own talk avoids Powerpoint (sorry Steve!), but it does have an attempt at a chemically-aware, semantically-rich web presence which can only be seen when one explores its nooks and crannies (or Easter eggs as one might call them). I am currently editing the audio podcast version (I am not sure if audio from any of the other presentations exists).

If you attended the session, you might recollect that the audience unfortunately did not have the direct opportunity to experience this web-presence. Perhaps this is a harbinger of what is to come, i.e. the expense of organising a meeting in a large expensive venue with all the associated travel and hotel costs might itself come to be seen as a scientific dinosaur. In this regard, of the 20+ presentations, three were given by people only present courtesy of Skype, or by proxy (i.e. Peter talking to their slides). It is gratifying that ACS rules allow this to happen (although if the proportion gets higher than 3/20, they might reconsider!).

I followed Steve’s link above and downloaded his PPT presentation. Doing so immediately reminded me of an event that took place about 8 years ago where I work. A new leader (we call them Rector here) wanted to make an immediate impact by disseminating a “mission statement” for our university. Complaints flooded in, largely because the presentation after downloading was 52 Mbytes in size, and broke many of the (older) versions of Powerpoint people had on their computers. I calculated the S/N ratio of that presentation at about 1/10,000. Now, Steve’s PPT was a mere 11.9 Mbytes, and its S/N ratio is far far higher than our august Rector’s was! (PS: the Rector’s response was to mandate that EVERYONE should immediately have their computer and software upgraded that they could view the 52 Mbyte presentation without difficulty. The alternative, to convert the presentation to HTML/XML, was not adopted).

Actually, as far as I am concerned the world has fallen in. Even Peter Murray-Rust showed a Powerpoint at the Skolnik session (actually, to be fair, PPT is nowadays XML under the hood, and I dare say there is no reason why the CML based chem4word plugin could not be made to work for PPT as well. In which event, Steve’s 11.9 Mbytes would look even better value for money).

One request Steve of your blog. Have you considered replacing the chemical diagrams you include by the SVG equivalent? You currently use bitmaps (.png), and gradient-shaded bitmaps were in large part why the Rector’s slides were 52 Mbytes in size). Or, if a bitmap is to be used, adopt .pngj (which is a jmol enhanced png, and which contains all the components needed to display a Jmol data-rich diagram instead of just the png if the device supports this functionality). I will endeavour to show an example of a .pngj file on my own blog presently.